Component testing plays an important role during the manufacture and assembly of hard disk drives. Testing individual components allows the manufacturer to determine whether specifications of a new design have been met prior to incorporating the new component into a fully assembled hard disk drive. Testing representative component samples provides a measure of quality control that may prevent the wasteful assembly of a large number of hard disk drives using a faulty batch of components.
Conventional testing systems typically are expensive and relatively complex. Conventional testing systems may cost several hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of dollars to purchase and maintain. Furthermore, many of these systems can test only one component at a time. The expense and capacity of conventional testing systems limits the number of testing systems a manufacturer can purchase given a limited budget and the number of components that can be tested within a given time frame.